Be aware that the mirrors are not updated instantly. Also, in many cases,
none of the FTP links on the Download page have been mirrored - they still
point to the same places as on the original web site. (The
HTTP links on the Download page have been mirrored.)

If you want to set up a mirror of the PuTTY website, go ahead and
set one up. Please don't bother asking us for permission before
setting up a mirror. You already have permission.

If the mirror is in a country where we don't already have plenty of
mirrors, we may be willing to add it to the list on this page. Read
the guidelines below, make sure your mirror works, and email us the
information listed at the bottom of the page.

NOTE: We do not promise to list your mirror, or
anyone's. We get a lot of mirror notifications, and yours may not
happen to find its way to the top of the list.

NOTE also: as of 2007-12-20, we link to all our mirror sites
using the rel="nofollow" attribute. Running a PuTTY
mirror is not intended to be a cheap way to gain search rankings.

The preferred (and simplest) way to mirror the PuTTY website is to use
rsync.
We provide a version of the website content
intended for use as a standalone mirror, at
rsync://rsync.chiark.greenend.org.uk/ftp/users/sgtatham/putty-website-mirror.
So you could set up a mirror by running a cron job which
issued a command something like this every day:

You should run this command inside the directory where you
plan to put the mirror; when that command is run, it will fill the
current directory with HTML files and subdirectories. Alternatively,
you can replace . with the name of the target directory.

If you use the above command to fetch our pre-packaged mirror site,
it will only work as designed if your web server is Apache: the site
contains a .htaccess file which handles a couple of
non-obvious MIME types and deals with making the virtual
subdirectory "latest" redirect to the current latest
release. You may need to configure Apache to honour the
.htaccess file with a directive such as
AllowOverride. If you do not use Apache, you will have to
reproduce this behaviour in some other way suitable for your own web
server.

(We prefer that the "latest" redirect be handled as an
HTTP-visible redirect, rather than a server-side filesystem tweak such
as a symlink, for better behaviour in the face of web caches.)

Since rsync is incremental, there should be no reason not
to update frequently, although currently there's no point in doing so
more often than once a day. In any case, we would recommend updating no
less often than once a week, in order to fetch any urgent updates such
as security bugfixes. You can also subscribe to our
mailing list to receive notification
of new releases.

We used to support an alternative method of mirroring using
GNU wget, and provided a sample shell script. This is now
deprecated in favour of rsync, for the
following reasons:

rsync uses less bandwidth;

the rsync method moves all the post-processing
complexity to our end, so we can implement changes and deal with bugs
much more easily - and in particular, it allows us to insert a note to the
effect that the mirrored site is a mirror site to reduce general
confusion;

we've had trouble in the past with mirroring wgets
going mad and eating all our host's bandwidth/CPU, which rsync
hasn't yet done, to our knowledge.

Once you've set up your mirror, mail us with its address and the
country it's in. However, before notifying us, please do test that
it works:

Check that the binary download links work.

Check that the binary download links point at your site, not
ours. If they point straight back to our own binary downloads, there
is not much point in having the mirror site in the first place!

Check that the on-line documentation for the latest release
works, and points at your site not ours.

If you want to comment on this web site, see the
Feedback page.
(last modified on Thu Dec 20 11:01:20 2007)